Senior Art Exhibition Opens Tonight

April 16, 2010

The Art Department is pleased to announce the opening of this year’s Senior Art Major’s Exhibition, with a reception this Monday, April 19th, 8-9:30pm.

This year’s exhibition features work by six talented graduating seniors working in a variety of media including: video, installation, sound, mixed media sculpture, and painting. The issues and ideas explored by each senior art major is as diverse as their chosen media, and the exhibition is shaping up to be a truly exciting and thought provoking event.

The artists include Miguel Aguilar, Juan Diaz, Korey Pazour, David Rosborough, Michael Scott, and Dan Sutton. The exhibition will run from April 19th through May 16th.

In his paintings and sound sculpture, Miguel Aguilar, an art/Spanish double major, adopts the narrative and stylistic devices of magical realism to explore issues of abandonment, restriction, and the loss of possibilities. His work is evocative of writers and artists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frida Kahlo.

In this work, the viewer encounters strange landscapes dotted with the presence of people long ago vanished. Stories are told, yet their meanings remain open to interpretation and seem to conclude without closure. Listen carefully and you can hear a voice telling a tale, the sound emanating from the belly of a floating dress, worn by a woman never seen.

Juan Diaz, an art major and political science minor, explores the syntax of painting by creating densely layered canvases made up of fields of color and richly textured line.

The work has an encrusted feel, at times evoking deep recessive spaces, and at other times geological pilings of mark and gesture.

Multiple canvases act in groups, speaking to one another and suggesting relationships built upon subtle differences.

Korey Pazour, an art major and English minor, uses humor and irony to tackle his struggle to understand the place of religion in his own life, as well as to challenge viewers to question its place in theirs.

His paintings playfully make use of board games and their rational sense of structure to ironically explore what he believes to be elements of religion that are illogical.

For Korey, humor is not a method to avoid an issue, but rather to engage it.

Working with a combination of painting and sculpture, David Rosborough, an art major and economics minor, creates hybrid works of art that explore fundamental elements of architectural forms and spaces.

His pieces act as pure visual abstractions yet simultaneously suggest themselves to be some kind of working models for futuristic structures.

At the heart of his practice, Dave plumbs the idea in architecture of “the ruptured surface”, using physically incised lines, paint, mark making and texture.

Michael Scott, an art major and English minor, creates larger then life cartoon characters set in a fully immersive, three-dimensional environment that the viewer can literally walk into.

His rag-tag gang of characters suggests archetypal outsiders and misfits that we can easily empathize with. Through careful design considerations, such as facial gesture, pose and costuming, Michael is able to convey a sense of each character’s back-story without the need for animation or other story telling devices typically seen in cartoons.

Though the characters and the installation they inhabit remain physically static, their story still unfolds.

Dan Sutton, an art major and religion minor, creates multi-channel videos that explore the genre of horror films, exploiting its tropes through the use of juxtaposition in order to disrupt the viewer’s expectations of a familiar narrative.

His installation, built in four parts, recalls old home movies screened in the family den. Within this setting, what seems to be impending terror never quite reaches its bloody climax. Rather, a state of constant unease and palpable tension permeates the installation, and what appears to be a familiar story line begins to break down into parts that at once add up to something un-nerving and at another instant seems perfectly benign.